So said Teddy Kennedy about his sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, dead at the age of 88.

In the competitive household of her youth, she established herself as the most intellectually gifted of the sisters in a family where the patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., decided that his sons were the ones bound for politics.

Within the constraints of her era, gender, and social strata, she was the most ambitious, too, becoming an international leader more than a half century ago in the burgeoning movement to wrest mental retardation from the shadows of hushed conversations.

A younger sister of Rosemary Kennedy, who was developmentally disabled and institutionalized most of her life, Mrs. Shriver dedicated decades to ensuring that other families would not endure the fate of her own, watching a loved one whisked behind closed doors. In an attempt to alleviate Rosemary’s intellectual disabilities, doctors performed a lobotomy that instead left her in need of constant care.

The Special Olympics is indeed a truly wonderful gift to the mentally disabled. What's terrible though is, as I listened to the story on NPR this morning and as they spoke of the inspiration that Rosemary was to Eunice, all I could think was, "was this before or after her father lobotomized her?".

Developmentally disabled, my ass. Her IQ may have been lower than the average in that generation of Kennedys, but that does not constitute "intellectual disabilities" and her diaries make clear that she was not retarded. After the lobotomy, yes - she lost her ability to speak due to the damage to her brain - but before that, she seems to have been a normal young woman as far as her intelligence is concerned.

ugh. Kennedys. Apologies to those who are enamored, but that clan is just some sort of bizarre, spoiled aristocracy. We don't do aristocracy in this country, guys; go away now, and please stay out of our politics.

To be fair, this woman seems like she has a more developed conscience than the others, so good for her.

There's a downside to all the expanded career opportunities for women. If Eunice had been able to channel her energy and drive into a career, we would have had another Kennedy in Congress (ugh). As it were, she used her gifts to organize the Special Olympics....I remember a time when fields like social work and occupational therapy and primary school teaching had some extremely gifted practitioners. I don't mean this as a knock on the current practitioners, but really some enormously bright women used to go into the helping professions. The upside of the caste system is that you get an equable distribution of brains among the different jobs.